Customer Service Metrics You Should be Tracking

Thanks to handy software tools, customer support teams are flush with different metrics and numbers to gauge performance.

While Net Promoter Score commands most of the attention, you should keep your eyes on these metrics when looking to offer a world-class customer experience.

Customer satisfaction

NPS provides a key statistic for your company’s overall health, but customer satisfaction reigns supreme when measuring the effectiveness of your support process. What’s the point of providing good customer service if you’re not satisfying the customer as much as you can? Give yourself a benchmark for measuring your customer service by surveying and polling your customers as often as necessary. As Intercom points out, numbers only go so far:

“Unfortunately, [other quantitative metrics] don’t give you any idea about the quality of the work you’re doing. No matter how fast you’re responding, if a customer wouldn’t recommend you to a friend after your interaction, you’re doing something wrong.”

Volume of interactions

You can also measure change by monitoring your volume of customer interactions. It’s the number of times your reps interact with your customers within a certain period, which could be a day, a week, or a month. CustomerThink explains that as a company grows and gains more users, the ratio of active issues versus resolved issues needs to decrease, “otherwise you will have an inaccurate representation of your performance.” Measuring this as your company grows can indicate the productivity and efficiency from your customer service reps. Training with software like Lessonly, shown to increase team’s productivity by over 20%, gives you much better rewards when you can track growth over time.

First response and resolution times

Make no mistake, first response time is an extremely important metric for customer service reps. However, you’re just focusing on half the story. Amar Zagorica from Helpjuice wrote this for Buffer,

“It’s simple, customers expect you to respond to their issues in a timely manner. And if we fail to meet expectations we’re likely to bring down our customer satisfaction considerably… However, a quicker response is a good way to stand out from competition and prove to customers that you value their business.”

You can definitely work on improving speed in response. And while live chats and emails give customers the expectation that you’re prioritizing their problems, you shouldn’t make rushing to the answer a singular goal. As Zagorica says, “Do not pat yourself on the back for answering questions within 1 minute if you’re not doing it efficiently.”

What’s the point of answering a question if you’re giving them the wrong answer? Counteract this by measuring resolution times alongside response times. This pair will ensure that you’re not only addressed problems quickly, but that you’re also resolving them quickly.

If you need to start building your library of customer support content, check out Lessonly. You can easily build and track Lessons so that your support team helps your customers more efficiently. Take a tour. Sign up today.